


The Last Word

by tiffany rawlins (wearemany), wearemany



Series: The Long Run [6]
Category: NSYNC, Popslash
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-06-24
Updated: 2002-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-16 03:07:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/167769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/tiffany%20rawlins, https://archiveofourown.org/users/wearemany/pseuds/wearemany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During The Long Run.</p><p>You're never allowed to say "no comment."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Last Word

_"The ball's in my court. Our court. His publicist isn't gonna comment."_

 _"He must be really pissed," Chris says. Justin's always been polite but among the five of them he's never ignored a fight unless he was too ticked to see straight. That was how it used to work, anyway._

  
 _No comment._

"You're never allowed to say 'no comment,'" Julie says. Julie gets paid a lot of money to tell Justin things like that, to tell him often and not always very nicely. "Don't ever say that again. Say, 'I have a right to a private life.' Say, 'I'm really very happy right now,' even if you're not."

Justin thinks Julie probably used to be a smoker, the way she tears through bottles of Tazo black tea with this fierce determination that things will be calmer, easier, on the other end. That's how Justin used to think about cocaine. Coke never really made things easier. He remembered this last week after it turned out that Valium didn't work anymore, and neither did Jack Daniels, and neither did getting people fired or throwing things around his living room. Though to be fair he tried both of those last two at the same time as the cocaine.

Justin is utterly, painfully not high at this moment. No matter how he bends his imagination he cannot for the life of him imagine how Lance quit everything at once. He wonders, because he's apparently as much of an asshole as everyone has implied, whether Lance actually stayed sober or just did a good job of faking it.

Fuck it, he can be an asshole if he wants, his boyfriend ran off without even leaving a note and the first thing he hears in almost three months is from Lance's new publicist by way of the New York Post and then filtered through Julie: "Yes, we broke up." The rest of Lance's statement is as chilled as glasses set up on a wet bar, brimming with ice water, waiting to be shaken clean and filled.

Justin really wants a drink. Julie looks at him like she's waiting for something, some kind of response, some kind of comment. More than any of the things Justin thinks he needs from Lance right now, he wants to have the last word, to come up with something that makes Lance feel like he's been punched in the gut. He's over being sad. He's over being heartbroken and inconsolable and unwashed and tear-streaked and every other cliché he became as days without Lance turned into weeks turned into months.

Julie leaves and Justin rolls a joint on the coffee table. He's over it.

 

 _It's not about stuff. We have a lot of stuff. It doesn't matter who gets what._

Lance doesn't comment about Chris. Chris doesn't comment about Lance. Everybody forgets to tell JC not to tell Justin that that part's true, too.

"I know it's hard right now, honey," JC says. Justin scrubs his face hard with the hand that's not holding the phone. He's sitting on the floor next to Lance's side of the bed. Even JC can't think of anything more helpful to say than that, and Justin breaks the antenna off the phone when he hangs up.

Justin came back and Lance seemed happy enough with Justin declaring their love on MTV to never bring Chris up again. If it's just about Lance making a point, he should have left Chris by now. Justin thinks he is most afraid that they never even talk about him, that it's like now that they have each other they don't even need the memories. He drinks cheap rum and cuts people out of faxed photos, making trios and quartets out of grainy group portraits. Sometimes he lets Chris or Lance stay in the band, but never both.

The next morning in the shower Justin twists the cold water tap too hard and the knob breaks off into his hand. Fucking cheap fucking Hollywood mansion, and Justin yanks at the hot water handle for ten minutes until it comes off, too.

He calls George, the guy his friend Melissa said was a really great business manager, and says only, "Sell the fucking house. I don't want it any more." George says sure. George always says sure. Justin thinks maybe he's getting ripped off but he can't quite decide if he cares.

He's pretty sure he's not getting ripped off when George calls back and tells him the house isn't his to sell.

"Then sell my half," he snaps. "I don't care how much or who."

George clears his throat. "It's not, uh. You don't have a half, Justin. Some of the things are both of yours and some things are just his. The house is his."

Justin fires George and gets a lawyer recommended by someone at the studio from his last film, but he still can't sell even half of a house that was never his to start off with. Eight, almost nine years together and he feels like he owes it all in back rent. __

_Life in Hollywood isn't like it is in the movies, you know._

When he was twenty-two and he thought about the future, he thought maybe it would be him and Lance at the piano, maybe Lance playing and Justin standing behind him, harmonizing. And they'd sing some old song, something that meant more to the two of them than anyone else who happened to be in the room, over for some dinner party or whatever. And he'd put his hand on Lance's shoulder and it would all be better than just familiar.

He thinks now that maybe that was a scene from one of the musicals Joey would watch on the bus, that that wasn't a very realistic thing to want out of life, or out of a life with Lance, anyway. He's thirty years old and he doesn't mean to be a baby about it, but he really thinks if they were all in the same room singing a song things would maybe turn out okay. __

_I'm just going to take some time off, get back to my roots._

Maybe he needs to get out of LA for a while. Go home, see his mom and let her tell him to get his shit together. He needs someone to tell him to get his shit together, to quit smoking so much weed and actually get on with his life.

He thinks he's always needed people he loves to tell him what to do, that what he's doing is a good idea. It's why he made Lance his manager, announcing it to a room full of industry people before he'd even really asked if that was okay, because he knew Lance would protect his money and help him find things to do that were a good idea.

Lance was really good at telling him he'd made the right decisions. With his voice worn out and offers on the table, being someone else full-time wasn't the worst idea in the world. And anyway, Justin thinks maybe even when he'd made the wrong decisions, it seemed like he was doing them well, and so no one told him to stop and get his shit together.

He sits stone-faced through meetings with his agent now and no one notices. Scripts come by courier and he leaves them stacked on the coffee table, still in fat manila envelopes. JC sends a red leather-bound notebook the size of a playing card by airmail, with a note that says only, "For when it gets harder."

He thinks about writing songs that sound like his life, not the kind of pop hook that's just about music, about being famous. But about his actual life. The kind where nothing hurts the ones you love like love. Where there are too many people squeezed into too small a space for too many years until they don't know how to want anything but each other. Justin thinks maybe there's a real song in there somewhere. He doesn't know if it would be a good decision. If it would be a hit.

He wants to be the biggest comeback story of the decade, for Lance to be unable to leave the house without hearing his name on some talk show, for Lance and Chris to strangle each other with his number one single playing on MTV in the background. He wants to run away to Italy and steal JC from his stupid rich boyfriend and for them to show up on Joey's doorstep beaming like newlyweds.

He wants to not feel every minute of his thirty years in the bad takes where his voice cracks or the notes seem too high, as elusive and slippery as the ghostly footsteps he pretends to hear outside the studio door. It's just him and one studio tech he overpays by the hour to keep his mouth shut, and after seventeen straight days when Justin can't even make a cover song sound right, he finds the hook he needs.

He builds harmonies on top like layers of clothing he's packed away for a winter that never came. He calls this session player he knows can lay down guitar where it's needed and stay out of the way otherwise. He mixes things himself, probably badly, but that doesn't seem to matter once he's gotten started.

It's more Elvis than Michael, more Patsy Cline than anything else. Justin has no idea if it's something a label will be willing to back, if he's making an album that someone will call a classic twenty years down the road or if the critics will laugh at the idea that he thinks he's got something sincere to say. He thinks maybe there are still people who would buy tickets to hear him perform, but he doesn't know if he'll be able to sing any of it live without having a very public breakdown.

He doesn't care about anything except getting the sound right. He'll make those other decisions later.

  
 _It's called The Last Word. And, no, it's not about him. It's about me._

**Author's Note:**

> "She's Got You" and Meet Me in St. Louis.


End file.
